Like many people, yesterday I finally got to enjoy the original cast performance of Hamilton and it was everything I’d known it would be. My friends know I’ve been obsessed with this play for four years. I’d listened through it dozens of times before I saw it live in SF (thank you times a million, Lauren Chain). I’ve read all the books, watched the documentaries, and evangelized its importance to those important to me. There’s a reason they released it when they did and I want to share my thoughts about that.
Now more than ever, we need to be reminded that we are a revolutionary country. But a revolution not based on identity, based on ideas. The first of many with more to come. If you think this is a “white supremacist holiday” I hope I can at least point you in the direction of your wrongness.
Obviously, we've yet to achieve the perfect expression of our ideals. American history is full of atrocities, corruption, and injustice. But despite their personal failings, their slaveholdings, their misogyny, and their religious dogma the founders of this country not only formulated the framework within which we have been given the mere possibility of freedom and a more perfect future, even more importantly, they were willing to die to do it.
Hamilton is a love song, not to the United States and its history or its founders but to the sacrifice and suffering of real people. This is its relevance to today. What we learned in history class was detached and devoid of drama. What Lin Manuel Miranda did was bring the story to life in a way that can be felt and known by a modern person. The founders were real people with friends and love and flaws and ideas. Yes, they were men. Yes, they were white. Some were immigrants or foreigners. But on a deeper level, the important level, their identities are meaningless. It's the ideas that were worth dying for. “Hate the sin, love the sinner.”
The fact that the play was written by a person of color and performed by a mostly Black cast, unironically, is significant. It shows us all that despite the obstacles and imperfections embedded in our institutions there was nothing preventing Miranda and the cast from embodying, truly grok-ing, the universal ideals the founders risked their lives for. That’s how we know they are artists and not propagandists.
Is there a single idea that you would die for? What I'm seeing is that many people aren't even willing to be made slightly uncomfortable in order to preserve the security of their own loved ones, let alone for something as abstract as equality. Many of us would die for our families but that’s not an idea. A global civilization in which people will only sacrifice for their kin is doomed, that’s a one-way ticket back to the caves.
What Hamilton did for me is bring that question right to the front of my mind and it's stayed there for four years. And I'm getting closer to answering it. In a sense, my depression and anxiety were a longing for something worth dying for. I could have joined the military in 2003 and gone straight to Iraq but that was not worth dying for. I could have thrown myself against a wall of cops last month. That would have been closer, but still not. The only thing worth dying for right now has yet to be revealed.
I've thought this for a while, I think I wrote it for the first time in 2016 right after the election, and it's my thesis here, the dogmatic husk of the United States of America is not worth dying or living for. The concept of the nation-state is an albatross, anchoring us to a social system that no longer serves the well being of humanity. It became irrelevant the moment the internet was switched on. But the founding ideals and the progress that followed are absolutely worth celebrating as a milestone on our journey onward to something that only vaguely resembles the current paradigm. The Fourth of July will always be a holiday, even when we live in a global collective of independent economic region-states.
It is our generation's mission to extract the sacred from the profane, rediscover and add in the ancient and the wise, and mix it all together to reveal a future worth dying for. Anything short of this will disgrace us in the eyes of both our ancestors and our children. “History has its eyes on us.” More now than any time in the last 250 years.
This doesn't mean we get to shit all over the old gods. This doesn't mean we can invent whatever fantasy world we imagine in our most woke fever dreams. It means we have to grow up. We have to do what grownups do and hold multiple, conflicting, difficult ideas within ourselves for an extended period of time so that we can put food on our tables and raise children free from deprivation. We have to take responsibility for everything we've done while simultaneously relinquishing our delusion of total control and security. Our civilization will only mature when we as individuals make the necessary sacrifices and temper our childish ideologies with reasonable pragmatism.
Realizing that one must grow up is the single most difficult journey of an individual life. Which is the reason it's the core of almost all of our culture's mythology. We’ve all seen the coming-of-age tale hundreds of times. On the most basic psychological level, growing up is the purpose of life. It is both universal and personal. It is singularly terrifying and utterly rewarding. There are a million reasons to not want to and only one path that gets there. Nobody can walk the path for us and the only guide is discomfort. It is the opposite of fun and the definition of meaning.
Realizing one hasn't grown up is deeply painful and embarrassing. Remember being a teenager and thinking you were grown up but being told you couldn’t do something because you weren’t “old enough”. Nothing hurt worse than feeling ready and being held back by authority. Are we feeling that right now? We were poisoned by the idea of “old enough” because then we thought all we had to do was wait to get older. But age ain’t nothing but a number. So many of us thought all we had to do was graduate high school, turn 18, or get a job and we’d be automatically initiated into adulthood. Those are useful indicators but far from sufficient.
There is a strong affinity between these ideas and parenthood, and I think for good reason. Much of the context for my commentary is what I see on social media from my friends. I’ve had to stay away for a few weeks as I’m sure many of you have as well. It’s toxic right now. But what I’ve seen has revealed something interesting. Of all my friends participating in what I see as well-intentioned but ultimately harmful sharing of propaganda, 100% of them are NOT parents. I have yet to see a parent be swept away by ideological dogma. Parenthood is not necessary, but it seems to be sufficient. There’s nothing like total responsibility for another life to make one deeply consider the impact of their actions in the world.
“Look around, look around, at how lucky we are to be alive right now.” This might not seem the case but I’m sure most people alive in the colonies in 1780 thought they would lose and be punished by King George. We are only in the early stages of the next revolution. Things will likely get worse before they get better. Sacrifice will be necessary. Suffering is inevitable. Try hard to imagine a future you would die to create, hold it in your mind, work to make it real. Who will they be singing about 250 years from now?
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